XML namespace issue
This section describes an issue that can occur when using XPath expressions
with XML documents containing namespaces.
For more information about namespaces,
see XML
namespace and Namespaces in XML.
Description
Currently, XPath expressions work as expected when the XML document does not have any namespaces. However, with any document containing namespaces, including default namespaces, XPath expressions can return unexpected results.
For example, with the XML document below, the expressions /a,
//c, and //c/@name all return an empty
array:
<a xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/example">
<b>
<c name="name1"/>
</b>
</a>Workaround
To avoid this issue, you can use an XPath expression that fetches a tag by its name, which allows you to ignore the namespace. For the examples above, you can use /*[name()='a'], //*[name()='c'], and //*[name()='c']/@name.